These Are the New Best WordPress Themes for Podcasters – TAP336

Podcasters need a WordPress theme designed with features and flexibility to support podcasting. Here's why I think SecondLine Themes are your new best choice!

1. Integration with PowerPress

The reason I’m listing this as number one is because Powerpress is the top podcasting plugin for WordPress and is used by more than 60,000 podcasters. It’s also a really good framework for supporting podcasting on a WordPress website.

With PowerPress in place, if you wanted to switch your podcast player, you simply switch the player plugin and it automatically changes for all of your past and future podcast episodes. No need to go back through each episode post and change the player.

If you’re publishing your RSS feed from PowerPress, then having a theme that works with it is really a no-brainer. I’m surprised how many WordPress themes say they’re a podcast theme, but they don’t support PowerPress!

SecondLine Themesdoes support PowerPress, which is really important to me and I think it is important for any podcast WordPress theme to do.

2. Support for other podcasting plugins for WordPress

If you don’t use PowerPress, then no worries! SecondLine Themes also supports other podcasting plugins:

If there’s a major plugin that SecondLine Themes doesn’t support, or that’s really important to your workflow, reach out to their support and they can probably get it integrated easily and quickly.

3. A versatile embed field for more player options

Maybe you don’t want to use a WordPress plugin to put a player on your website and would rather use one from your podcast hosting provider, such as Libsyn, Captivate, Simplecast, Anchor, and such.

SecondLine Themes makes it really easy to paste the embed code for your player into a special embed field and then it will display that player in the normal places instead of the built-in SecondLine Themes player.

This embedded player can be HTML, an iframe, or Javascript. Simply paste that code into the special embed field and the theme will take care of the rest.

Just getting a player to display with the excerpts for your episodes can be really difficult if that player doesn’t have a WordPress plugin but SecondLine Themes makes that really easy.

You can even use it for one-off things like a special embed code from another podcast or a YouTube video.

4. Beautiful design

Yes, SecondLine Themes have the standard theme features: responsive design, support for SEO, optimized for speed, and such. But let’s focus on the aesthetics!

SecondLine Themes are beautiful! They’re clean, modern, and future-technology focused. There are some podcast themes that focus on using images, but images will slow down a website. Images don't look good on all devices, especially smaller screens or high-resolution displays (iPhones, Google Pixels, MacBooks, etc.).

If you do like to use images with your episodes, as I like to do, SecondLine Themes have some great options for how to display those, even with special effects!

I personally designed and custom-programmed The Audacity to Podcast's previous WordPress theme, built on the Genesis Framework. People would ask where they could get the theme, but it wasn’t for sale and I no longer offer web design services. But with SecondLine Themes I can recommend a solid design that they can use.

5. Podcast-focused features

In addition to supporting PowerPress, other podcasting plugins, and embeddable players, there a lot of podcast-focused features that many podcasters want on their sites.

A big feature you might love is that several of the themes from SecondLine Themes have built-in support for a podcast network! Even if you don’t have an official network, you may have multiple shows.

On The Audacity to Podcast website, I actually have multiple shows:

The Audacity to Podcast

Inside the Podcasting Business (which I may bring back)

I’m also a co-host on Podcaster’s Roundtable (but that has it's own website for the content itself)

I also publish a separate Podcasting Videos by The Audacity to Podcast (and upload to YouTube and Facebook)

Tusant and Bolden have built-in features for podcast networks (and the other themes probably will eventually, too). These let you associate individual episodes with your separate podcasts so that they look different for those separate shows.

For example, each episode can use a show header that includes the podcast title, cover art, and subscription buttons. Then, when someone lands on the single episode webpage, they see the promotion for the show in a beautiful way.

Some podcast themes are still talking about “iTunes” (now called “Apple Podcasts”) and they may not even support Google Podcasts, Subscribe on Android, Spotify or others. The subscription buttons plugin that you can get with SecondLine Themes does support these!

If you don't want to mess with third-party player or podcasting plugins, SecondLine Themes still has you covered!

Yes, many WordPress themes have audio players, but they aren’t ideal for using with podcasts and really have no true podcasting support. But the players SecondLine Themes includes are meant for podcasts and work very well.

There's also built-in styling for popular email-newsletter-subscription plugins!

6. Easy setup

I was blown away by how easy it was to get set up with SecondLine Themes!

For example, it asks for your license key as you’re installing the theme, so you don't have to find where to enter that later. And it recommends and auto-installs plugins for you. It can even import a bunch of sample content for you to use while setting up your website! This makes the onboarding experience much better most themes.

7. Friendly Elementor page builder

There are many different page builders out there, and my next episode will talk more about what a page builder is, how to use one, and my recommendations, which include Elementor.

In short, as the name implies, a page builder helps you to build a webpage. But it does so very easily without your having to know all about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or PHP. You can drag and drop items, scale them as you’d like, and more to get exactly the results you’re looking for.

Elementor is, in my opinion, the best page builder. It’s very powerful and there’s even a free version to get you started!

But you don’t have to pay for Elementor Pro because SecondLine Themes includes the free Elementor version. Plus, the themes include Elementor widgets for you to display a list of episodes with players, and more.

8. Extensive customization options

SecondLine Themes contain a lot of options for you to change how your site looks through the standard WordPress Customizer. You can change fonts, colors, layout options, toggle features, and much more all without having to know code. Plus, you can see what your changes will look like before you publish.

9. Fantastic support and updates

I have emailed Thomas from SecondLine Themes a lot! I've suggested things, reported bugs, and asked for help. The support they provide is fantastic! They’re fast, they push out updates frequently, and they are supporting the theme really well.

There was a previous theme for podcasters that I recommended, but then they just disappeared. Their support team disappeared first then they stopped answering emails, then the website broke. Then it came back but they stopped putting out updates. But SecondLine Themes is very active in supporting their themes and I expect them to stay strong for a long time.

Also, SecondLine Themes doesn’t require you to buy another framework (like the Genesis Framework) in order to use their themes. Pricing and licensing are simple!

SecondLine Themes makes it easy. You can subscribe to only one theme, a bundle, or you can purchase lifetime access. (I suggest the lifetime option as it gives you access to all of their themes, lifetime updates, and is ideal if you have multiple websites.)

10. Plus: free podcast-importer plugin

They also offer a free podcast-importer plugin great for re-syndicating your podcast. For example if you had a network website and you have separate podcasts on different websites with different RSS feeds, you can use the free podcast-importer plugin to bring those all in to the central network site, regardless of how the other podcast feeds are generated (even if they're not WordPress)!

If you use one of those network-ready themes—currently Tusant and Bolden—then this importer plugin can automatically put things in the right places so your network site can look and work great for you!

11. For me, Tusant already did about 90% of what I wanted!

For my own websites, I've worked with Themify, Divi, and Beaver Builder, and some other themes. I had an idea of what I wanted to do with my site, but it was taking so long to develop.

If you’ve been following The Audacity to Podcast for a while, you may have noticed that I updated the cover art but didn’t update the website design to match. I was digging into PHP code and other elements trying to get it different themes to work, then updates would break things. It was a mess and was taking too long.

But Tusant already does about 90% of what I was looking for! And as they update it, that number is only going to climb without my having to do any sort of custom coding.

I was working with other themes for a couple of years and didn’t launch the redesign of the site. With Tusant, I had my site nearly ready with only a couple hours of work, and then was able to fully launch over a weekend.

So if you want the best WordPress theme for podcasting, I highly recommend any from SecondLine Themes!

Disclosure

This post may contain links to products or services with which I have an affiliate relationship and may receive compensation from your actions through such links. However, I don't let that corrupt my perspective and I don't recommend only affiliates.

1 comment on “These Are the New Best WordPress Themes for Podcasters – TAP336”

Totally agree. We use Second Line Themes for our radio program website. Right “out of the box” it worked, it’s very customizable, and the documentation is excellent. The tech support sets them apart. Responsive and definitely helpful… go the extra mile kind of helpful… which I have needed and appreciated. Can’t recommend them enough.

This website contains links and references to products and services that may include affiliates, sponsorships, or other business relationships in which The Audacity to Podcast and D.Joseph Design LLC may receive compensation from referrals or sales actions.

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